Google's Vision of the Future? Bicycle Meets Monorail

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Google's Vision of the Future? Bicycle Meets Monorail

Two years ago Google launched the 10^100 project to give millions to fund ideas that will change the world. After being overwhelmed by 150,000 ideas, Google finally announced five winners on Friday.

One of the top five is a company appropriately called Shweeb that proposes building a monorail made of little clear capsules powered by people pedaling recumbent bicycles. Google is giving the company $1 million to fund R&D to "test Shweeb's technology for an urban setting."

Quite simply, Google must have gotten 149,996 stupid suggestions for this to have gotten funding. Monorails are kind-of cool in that Disney-theme-park way, and recumbents are efficient bicycles – if entirely unsuitable for daily, urban cycling. But combining the two is something not even the worst sci-fi writer would conjure up.

Can you imagine how sweaty and stinky these things would become? If I'm going to pedal something to get somewhere, it's going to be using a bike that can actually turn and take me to my destination. Moreover, these things are bound to be slow, and will probably need a large staff of attendants, like a theme-park ride, to ensure that people get on and off safely.

That's about the best one could hope for.

Shweeb is about to announce where its first public-transit system will be installed. We're thinking it might work well in Miami Beach, where the well-tanned can shuttle from hotel to beach in a bathing suit, showing off their liposuctioned and collagen-injected derrieres through the plexiglass capsule to onlookers below.

It might also work well in Portland, Oregon, where it could convey bearded computer programmers (the core market for recumbent bikes) from one brewpub to another.

Or maybe it will eventually replace the miniature and embarrassing multicolored bikes that Google engineers ride around the Mountain View campus.

The Khan Academy, a nonprofit educational organization that "provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos" is getting $2 million. That will help he organization make more courses and translate them into multiple languages.

FIRST, a nonprofit that runs team competitions to promote science and math, is getting $3 million to promote student-driven robotics teams.

The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) runs a one-year program to help recent university graduates prepare for Ph.D. and master's programs. Google is giving it $2 million to promote math and science graduate study in Africa.

Those all sound like great initiatives.

But the Schweeb plan? That's just an embarrassing choice. And that's coming from someone who lives in a city, rides a bike as his main form of transportation, takes public transit, and doesn't own a car.

Maybe Google was just wanting to show off that it's quirky, but man, oh, man, if that's the future, I want out of this theme park now.